I feel like no one bothers to read LM Montgomery's other works, like the ones where she spends an entire story roasting an HAP, and then showing the result of her rigidity and idealism. So they think her work is all positive about adoption.

LM Montgomery was my first taste into how adoption isn't someone prancing through a bunch of poppies.

And since many people hold up Anne of Green Gables wrong, as a positive adoption story, I seriously think Maud would hate them for that. You missed the point.

She worked hard later in her life to nuance the story of adoption in the Anne of Green Gables series, but I think she never was quite satisfied with it, since she revisited the subject again and again and couldn't quite redeem Anne of Green Gables and ended up hating the work.

She was an intrafamily adoptee, so knew what it felt like to be as such, and Anne of Green Gables was her attempt to try to argue that child slavery was wrong and children shouldn't be treated like cattle. But everyone misses that. She was also very much an activist in her times.

But everyone reads Anne as a happy-go-lucky Pollyanna, along the line of non-ownvoices stories like Little Princess. But if you read carefully, it's remarkably different. There are points where she is critical, where she tries to nuance things, ask about the orphanage system.

She asks about diseases in the orphanage system, what it means to be given up, what it means to find out your parents are dead, etc. It's far, far more nuanced. And finally, she adds other adoptees for other perspectives on the subject later on.

She is the first author I know to address how siblings shouldn't be split up in the adoption system, with a deft hand, that it took me years of reading adoption history and lore to finally get that. She was ahead of her times in many ways.

She asks about the welfare of orphans, children, and so on, but often these themes are in the background. And while she wasn't a perfect person, I really do admire her guts on this one. She was saying back then, what we have been trying to say now.